Along with the continuous development of electronic commerce transaction platforms and the rapid growth of technologies such as conventional communications and mobile communications, an increasing number of people acquire commodities they desire through online shopping. The types of commodities may involve every aspect of daily lives of the people, which include, for example, commodities of categories such as house appliances and furniture, etc. For these types of commodities, common logistics providers may not be able to provide corresponding distribution services due to such properties of the commodities as large volume, heavy weight and vulnerability etc., and users generally need to bear high distribution costs. Therefore, selling commodities of categories, such as house appliances and furniture, etc., in e-commerce transaction platforms faces difficulties.
Therefore, some e-commerce transaction platforms provide a unified logistics service for a first user of these types of commodities. The service first provides a plurality of logistics warehouses, with each warehouse having a distribution coverage thereof. For example, the first user (such as a seller, etc.) of house appliances may subscribe to one or more logistics warehouses according to a target marketing region thereof, and store commodities thereof in the subscribed logistics warehouses. When a second user (such as a buyer, for example) views a commodity in commodity details or purchase interface, an e-commerce transaction platform may perform matching for a coverage of a logistics warehouse based on an address where the second user is located, and display an inventory in the logistics warehouse to the second user upon successful matching. After the second user pays for an order, a logistics order is generated and sent to a logistics system. The logistics system makes a delivery accordingly, and “the goods of the seller” are distributed to the second user through a series of distribution nodes. For a selling user, the logistics system is a product that integrates resources of various logistics nodes (such as warehousing, transfer stations, and distribution, etc.) and provides a convenient logistics service, which meanwhile can improve the quality of the logistics service and reduce the logistics cost.
In a real application, a first user who has subscribed to a logistics warehouse always needs to run some promotion activities in order to obtain more sales channels to increase sales volume, such as conducting an advance sale of his/her goods. A major difference of an advance sale from a common online sale of commodities is that a payment of the second user is generally divided into two installments: the first one is a payment of a deposit, and the second action is a payment of a remaining balance. In general, the advance sale may be classified into two types: a spot advance sale and a future advance sale. The so-called spot advance sale refers to an advance sale of commodities currently stored in a logistics warehouse, and a specific solution has been provided for this type of advance sale in existing technologies. For example, a commodity details page or a purchase operation page may request an inventory center to acquire a regional inventory display. Based on a delivery address of the current second user, the inventory center acquires a corresponding list of warehouses subscribed by the first user that cover a region of the delivery address, and obtains an inventory of a warehouse that meets associated condition(s) to return to the commodity details page or the purchase operation page for display. Meanwhile, the second user is requested to pay a deposit within a certain period of time to generate a transaction order, and pay the remaining balance within a certain period of time to generate a logistics order, so that a delivery can be made for the user.
On the other hand, futures are commodities that are not in stock in a current warehouse and need to wait for new production, or commodities that have been produced but are not put in storage. Correspondingly, the future advance sale refers to an advance sale of commodities that are waiting for new production or commodities that have been produced but are not put in storage. Since no commodity is in stock during an advance sale for this type of advance sale, avoiding an event of “over-sale” in which sales volume exceeds commodity inventory volume or an event of exceeding a distribution coverage during the future advance sale, so as to avoid a waste of network computing resources and consumption of time and energy of users, has become a technical problem that needs to be solved urgently by one skilled in the art.